Repeat
by reminiscent-afterthought
Summary: 'Even if you don't remember, the only thing you could have learnt that year would be how to become a murderer' ... Except he had learnt more, and the past didn't take kindly to being left alone


**A/N**: Sari-chan recommended this to me, and the first chapter had me hooked. :) So, of course, it also got my plot-bunnies hooked. (I started this before The Damaged Left Eye ^^)

This is AT for the last chapter of the manga (or the epilogue of the anime, but where things differ I'm following the manga version).

Cover's made by me on powerpoint. :) My first time making one, so I hope it came out alright.

Enjoy.

* * *

**Repeat  
**_: the past can never be erased :_

**Chapter 1 – Melancholy**

The air had a melancholic tinge upon his tongue, and for a moment he simply lay still and tried to place it. He gave up in the next moment; the smell of rubber and antiseptic told him he was in a hospital, and the miasma of sickness and death were unavoidable.

Somehow though, the feeling seemed to be coming from somewhere closer…

'Kouichi!'

He opened his eyes, finding his father's worried face looming all too close.

'Ah, whoops.'

The man pulled back, rubbing his beard, and Kouichi knew the sudden shock must have shown something on his expression. But it faded away into a duller wound as he noted the strained features, the stiff posture and the forced tone.

Even the grin, so often lax in thought, was forced.

'Father?'

'What is it?' the other said immediately. 'Are you in pain? Having trouble breathing? Should I get the nurse?'

Kouichi heard the steady patter of panic but found himself not fully listening to it. Instead, his attention wondered to more abstract things: the odd sort of warmth that seemed to linger in the room, the strain that seemed to cling to his father. Much like the dregs of coffee at the bottom of a cup, Kouichi found himself thinking. The sort that stuck around after one failed to mix it thoroughly the first time, and no amount of further mixing would mend it.

'Kouichi?'

His eyes travelled up; for a moment, his father's expression looked panicked. 'I'm fine,' he reassured, albeit quietly. 'It's nothing.'

It was a poor effort, but it seemed enough to placate his father; the man visibly relaxed, shoulders slumping forward a little as hand blindly sought a chair. It found one, and for a moment the scraping across tiles was all that could be heard until Yousuke plopped into its seat with a sigh.

'I'm getting too old for this,' he mumbled to himself, and Kouichi had a little more strength in him he might have raised his head from the pillow to listen more closely. But he didn't; his most recent relapse had exhausted him utterly, and three days after regaining his senses he was yet to make any substantial movement from his little haven. He was ill, yes, and recovering somewhat slowly, but it was something else that sapped the largest portion of strength from him. Something in the air it seemed…

Yousuke fiddled around with his jacket pocket, before pulling out a cigarette box and tapping a single stick out from within before sticking it in his mouth and chewing on the end.

Kouichi looked at him; he didn't recall his father ever smoking…but then again, he didn't remember much of the current year at all.

Yousuke saw the look and his lips quirked a little. 'Relax,' he said. 'I'm not lighting up in a hospital; don't worry.' A heartbeat passed after that, before he added: 'Last year you would have scolded me thoroughly if you saw me with a cigarette.'

'Would I have?' Kouichi wondered aloud, before tilting his head a little so he could see the window a little better. 'Hmm…I suppose I would have.'

He didn't sound particularly sure though, nor overly committed to his words.

Yousuke sighed once more, ceasing the senseless chewing taking the cigarette out of his mouth. 'I'm starting not to regret surprising you.'

'Huh?' Kouichi's eyes travelled slowly towards him, before moving away again.

The chair scraped again. 'You still need rest,' he said sternly, adapting the tone he used with some of his more wayward students. It was a tone he rarely had to use at home, because their relationship as father and son had only grown in distance since Ritsuko died, and there had been nothing before that to salvage. After all, how much could a week old baby bond with his father?

Yousuke forced a grin on his face, to which Kouichi's eyes wandered lethargically over again. He was sure the boy could see the difference – as interested in art and the horror genre as he was, it would be inconceivable for him not to – but it seemed to give birth to nothing more than a fleeting curiosity.

Something else was bothering Kouichi, and Yousuke could not even pretend to understand. 'You still need rest,' he repeated instead. 'We'll have plenty of time to talk once you're feeling better.'

Kouichi looked as though he was going to say something else, then reconsidered. 'Okay,' he agreed, drifting back to the window and the brown smears of scenery beyond it.

* * *

Once outside the hospital, Yousuke had little misgivings about replacing the cigarette between his teeth and, this time, lighting the end of it. Soft billows of smoke wallowed around his throat, clinging to the walls and scratching lightly, as though displeased. But then the main inhaled sharply and the irritation fled, the sensors lining the sensitive skin adjusting to the insult.

And it was an insult, in more ways than one, because Ritsuko would probably be appalled. Kouichi should, by all rights, be as well; it was his lung condition that was most at risk, considering Yousuke had found himself floundering for the last fifteen and a half years without accomplishing much at all. He couldn't even say in his defence that he'd reared a good son – because Reiko, through phone calls, letters and drawings, had probably been a better parent than he. The ease at which Kouichi had agreed to come to Yomiyama had poured even more truth into that –

Except that didn't make much sense, because Reiko had been dead for almost a year when Yousuke had been asked to come overseas. That was what had caused the first attack, or so the Doctors had assumed. He shook his head, mulling over the strange bump in his memory; he could swear he remembered Kouichi saying something about that, but for the life of him he couldn't remember _what_. There were Ritsuko's school photos: he remembered Kouichi inquiring about that, and about her ninth grade in general, but not much else. And he could tell him little at all, because Ritsuko had been strangely tight-lipped about that period of her life.

He sighed. It seemed it had been a bad idea, despite the initial enthusiasm. He might have been less worried of Kouichi had stayed in Tokyo, with his usual classmates…but it had seem a good idea at the time, considering the child murderer had made his son's second year of middle school harder than it should have had to be.

And all the incidents and deaths that had occurred in the current one…

He shook his head and gently blew out more smoke, watching it take nonsensical forms. He had never imagined such things would happen in the quiet country town. Tokyo, he could accept, bustling with constant activity as it was, but Yomiyama was place he had always thought of as peaceful, with nature…a place where he could slow down.

That was partly the reason he rarely visited, and until Reiko's death never brought Kouichi along. After losing Ritsuko, it felt as though something would stop moving if he returned. But…almost losing his son wasn't quite what he had had in mind when he had thought that.

'Sakakibara-san?'

He crushed the cigarette tip on a nearby bin and turned around, finding a girl in Yomi North's – as called by the local residents – standing there, indiscriminate of the others her age who passed them by on the streets, save the eye-patch over her left eye, the strangely detached demeanour she exhibited and the single red eye picking him out of the crowd.

He crossed the street to meet her, thinking she might be a friend of his son. The girl seemed more hesitant to address herself as thus however, for the pause seemed uncharacteristic of the expressionless face and otherwise monotone speech.

'My name is Misaki Mei,' she said. 'A…friend of Sakakibara-kun.'

'Misaki-chan,' Yousuke repeated. His son hadn't mentioned the name…but then again, he'd mentioned next to nothing about his life at Yomiyama. 'I'm afraid Kouichi isn't up to having visitors right now.'

'I know,' the girl said calmly, and Yousuke stared at her in open surprise. The words, on their own, seemed insolent, however her tone somehow dampened that thought. 'I wanted to talk to you.'

Yousuke regarded her; her manner of speaking was somewhat…concerning, to say the least, and he had no idea what she intended to speak with him about. 'Are you a classmate?' he asked.

She nodded silently, and Yousuke nodded as well. He had a lot of questions too. 'Tea?' he offered.

* * *

'I don't like being questioned,' Mei said, barely having sipped her tea.

Yousuke lifted his head from his own coffee cup, before catching the small smile on the other's face.

'Sakakibara-kun was the exception.' Her tone lightened somewhat as she said the name. 'He never really stopped with his questions, even when it was just: "Are you sure?" Even _then_…'

Yousuke almost missed the emphasis on the last word, but well-trained teaching ears managed to pick it up. However, before he could address it Mei spoke again.

'Sakakibara-kun has an interest in art.' She looked seriously at him over her cup. 'Do you disapprove?'

The man was quite taken aback at that, and glad he hadn't started on his coffee yet. He did so immediately after, mulling over the sudden change in topic – if there had initially been a topic to speak of – and the question in itself.

'Why would you think I disapprove of my son's interests?' he asked, almost rhetorically, in reply.

She said nothing, single eye regarding him carefully.

Yousuke sighed, thinking a little further. 'I was never…thrilled,' he said slowly, 'about his obsession with horror stories…'

'That's not surprising,' Mei nodded when the other's voice trailed off.

Surprised he hadn't been asked for an explanation, Yousuke continued: 'I have no problem in his interest in art, except if he decides to start drawing in textbooks or his notes.'

Mei's lips quirked. 'He won't do that.'

Yousuke was surprised to see the girl so sure of that. 'What brought this up?' he asked, only for the girl to lose her, albeit questionably defined, smile.

'I wanted to ask, or tell, you something else. About the curse of class 3-3.'

'A curse.' Yousuke drank a little more of his coffee, then set the half-empty cup down. In contrast, Mei's almost full beverage swayed gently with the café's overhead light. 'I would hope that fifteen is old enough to have stopped believing in curses.'

'Is that what you believe, Sakikabara-san?' She eyed him again, and Yousuke felt increasingly uncomfortable under her gaze. It felt almost as if she were the teacher and he her pupil, and yet he had been a professor for so long he had almost forgotten the feeling of being a student caught in that gaze.

'What do you believe?' he returned.

'I would like not to believe in curses,' Mei replied, 'but this is one I have witnessed with both my eyes.'

He considered her. 'Your own two eyes, you mean?'

She touched the patch which covered her eye, but said nothing.

Yousuke sighed. 'Curses are just a way to explain things science, at the current time, cannot.'

'I see.'

Yousuke was taken aback at the sudden scraping of the chair, but Mei's facial expression did not change as she stood and retrieved her satchel. 'Wait!' he called to her, his own chair scraping as he pushed it back.

She paused in her departure.

'What made my son like this?' It was a question that bordered on desperation; perhaps it even merged all the questions he had wanted to ask into one.

Mei looked back for a moment – or appeared to do so, as it was the covered eye that faced him. 'The curse did,' she said quietly. 'That one which surrounds class 3-3.'

* * *

Mei had already known what to expect when she met with Kouichi's father, Sakikabara Yousuke. Kouichi had told her a bit about him: how he lectured in particle physics at Tokyo University of Science, how he was a firm believer of the empirically proven. How he was always busy with work, leaving the other in the care of neighbours, friends, and finally himself, but how he would always show up for important events, and take time off when he felt sick, particularly the month stretch that saw his pneumothorax suddenly rear his head.

That was probably why Kouichi hadn't seemed bitter when he spoke of the man, even if their relationship was somewhat distant. Kouichi had described him as "like an over-affectionate uncle, but not really much of a father most of the time," and when he'd lead on to complain about having to cook because of his father's inability to do so, Mei found herself subtly agreeing. As least Kirika cooked, even if it was rarely for lunch.

Apart from that though, Sakikabara Yousuke didn't remind her muck of Kirika at all. He didn't seem to care much for the beauty of things for one; his face when he saw her eye-patch was open curiosity rather than the curl of displeasure and disgust. And he was a man who didn't seem to mind the oddity that had befriended his son…except when she mentioned the Calamity.

He wouldn't be swayed by her; she knew it, particularly since the evidence so flawlessly vanished. The murders he would find out about elsehow – perhaps even from the police themselves – but what lay beneath that would be written off as coincidence…unless Kouichi's memories came back.

She'd tried to visit him; the doctors hadn't let her in, as she was not his family. But they'd told her – and their other classmates – what had happened. The pneumothorax was easily explainable: a chest tube to drain the collapsed area of the lung, extra oxygen, and lots of rest. The loss of memory was less so, though she thought it to be a mix of the Calamity and the trauma it had brought.

She was surprised…and a little saddened, at the result. But Kouichi had loved his Aunt like a mother, like that mother which neither of them had had the chance to know. And he…he had been the one to return her to death.

She gave a sharp shake of the head, something most who knew her would have been surprised to see. But to her it was acceptable; it was because of her own weakness that she had put her best friend, the person closest to her after her dead twin, in that situation. If she hadn't accepted his call, if she hadn't told him where she was, if she hadn't hesitated time and time again and let him take the sickle from her limp hands and do the deed himself. If she had just dealt with the problem before it started, before Kouichi had even met her, then they could have avoided all that death and needless suffering. And Kouichi wouldn't have had the chance to get so close to a dead person.

But ultimately, she couldn't find it in her heart to regret it – save the end. Because if she had told who the Extra one was when the term started, if she had done something about it, she may not have had the chance to know Kouichi as well as she did now, and become his friend…

But it was a selfish thing, she mused to herself as she turned into a side-street and the hospital vanished from view, to trade friendship for the lives of other people. But even when she knew what to do with the Extra one, knew it would stop the Calamity that year, knew that they would be the next ones to die if she failed, she still hadn't been able to do it.

Izumi had called her a doll, then. But dolls were hollow of restraint, and sorrow. The only person she could blame for the loss of her friend has herself, because Kouichi remembered nothing of Yomiyama at all. Not his previous visit to Reiko's funeral, nor his current one. He didn't remember class 3-3, nor the Calamity.

There was no reason for him to remember her, and when her memories of the Calamity vanish as well, she wondered how much of Kouichi she would still remember.

* * *

Yousuke lit another cigarette and watched Misaki Mei's retreating back. She was an unusual girl, and he had failed to grasp her. Her demeanour was interesting, fascinating even – like a puzzle all the more satisfactory when solved. Someone you could be sure you know well once you saw something beyond that carefully crafted expression. Not exactly his sort of woman, but he could see how she came to befriend his son. Maybe. He was lacking the context after all, for what possessed her to go out of her way and talk to him in the first place? Somehow, she didn't seem the sort.

The manner in which she had broached the subject of curses though…that had been more disturbing, and he didn't like it. He didn't like the idea that there was something outside man's control dictating a game far more intricate than the passage of life and death. He didn't like that there was something unavoidable, intangible, sneaking into the lives of innocent others, others who should even have been involved in the far-gone past.

And he most certainly didn't like the idea of death being able to return to life. Or death in general; Ritsuko's had been the first and closest to his heart, and he found himself thereafter caught in a web. Wanting to keep his only son, his only remnant of her love, as close to him as possible – and to detach himself so neither would suffer as much in the future. But it was a fool's errand, and he was only a foolish man in the end.

He would have to cut back his smoking too; whether his son scolded him or not there was more than his own health at stake. But it was so much easier, to study those little things that ran the world and write the rest of it off…but when his mother-in-law's frantic call had reached him in India he had forgotten it all. All he knew was that his son had almost died, caught in a fire and another pneumothorax attack. Three in six months, and only once before in his life…Yousuke shook his head. It was possible, yes, but unimaginable. And all of them in Yomiyama. Was it something the environment? Which had killed Ritsuko upon her return, destroyed Reiko, and now hurt his son as well?

The countryside was supposed to be away from the city's pollution, and its constant hustle of activity. A curse seemed like a reasonable conclusion, then, but he didn't want to accept it. The natural, the explainable…the preventable: that was the way the finer details of their lives ran.

And yet, he was thinking on it still, because that girl had mentioned it. He took another drag of his cigarette and pushed it out of his mind. It was foolishness, after all, to go around in circles on the whims of a school girl. If his son said something similar, then and only then would he think further on this "curse".

He had more important things to worry about, like the health of said son. As for the cause…maybe, if Yomiyama was so eager to bury it, it was best left buried.

Swirls of smoke spiraled towards the afternoon sky.

* * *

Kouichi opened his eyes when the silence stretched further than he was comfortable with. There was nothing to see though: the hospital room looked much like any other hospital room, and that was perhaps the only place in Yomiyama he remembered clearly. He remembered some other things, nonsensical, like the smell of dusty books and a strange hollow feeling, but they told him nothing at all.

He felt his eyes slipping closed again and did not fight it, thinking sleep was not a bad alternative at all to the mindless ambling about in his memories…or lack thereof. There was some strange echo, something he couldn't bring himself to chase no matter how hard he tried.

In the end, it was an exhausting and pointless exercise, made even more so by the drip in his right arm and the drainage tube inserted between his ribs. Both the Doctor and his father told him not to force his memories, though neither could understand why he had lost them in the first place. But there was nothing else he _could_ do, save mull over those gaps. Too many of them… Where had his five months at Yomiyama gone? What had he done? Why…why had he forgotten it all?

And why had his family – his father and his grandparents – seemed so tense?

He tried to shake his head, but couldn't quite manage it. That last question was easy enough to answer though; they had been scared, scared that he would die, just like his mother and his aunt…

His chest felt a little tight again, and he forcibly shoved those thoughts aside. That didn't stop the prickling of tears though, nor the aching of his heart.

It was strange; he didn't remember ever crying for his mother's death – Ritsuko had died soon after giving birth to him after all. He didn't remember crying at Reiko's funeral either…but he didn't remember much of the funeral at all. Just something about a dirty river…

Something pricked his skin and he opened his eyes again. A nurse was changing his drip.

It was a small distraction, but he welcomed it. He needed a break from sickness and death.


End file.
